Benefits of Walking in our Office Space

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Many of us set our resolutions in the new year only to quit shortly after. According to a survey by Statista, posted on December 23, 2022, the top resolutions for the 2023 year are:

To exercise more,
To eat healthier,
To lose weight,
To save money,
To spend more time with family and friends,
To spend less time on social media,
To reduce stress on the job,
To reduce spending on living expenses

According to Forbes Health, just 11% of resolutions last less than a month, 19% last at least one month, and 14% last at least three months. So why are we talking about New Year’s resolutions just before the start of the second quarter? Beginning a new routine to improve your health is always beneficial.

America's Top New Year's resolutions For 2023 by Statista — America’s Top New Year’s resolutions for 2023

Does this sound like you?

This morning, I was feeling sluggish after staying up too late watching the newest Stranger Things series. Once I arrived at Modern Work Suites & Studios, I took the elevator to the third floor, where I made it to my office to sit down for another 8-hour shift.

Oh, wait. I need to head to the Mixx Lounge for another cup of coffee, typically prepared in the morning before I arrive by Tom, head of building maintenance.

Now in my office, I focus on the tasks at hand, losing track of time, only to realize it is noon. It is time for lunch. After eating lunch, I sit back at my desk and continue the tasks for the next four hours, only to get up briefly throughout the day for a bathroom break.

At 5 pm, I headed home, grabbed dinner for the family and me, helped the kids with homework, put them to bed, and then went on the couch to start a new series or movie, only to fall asleep moments later.

The example above may sound different from your daily routine, but we all have our daily habits and routines. Do you engage in physical activity on a regular basis, or do you generally stay in one place for extended periods with only minimal movement, such as trips to the restroom or the snack machine?

Are you considering walking at Modern Work Suites?

Even before the pandemic, sedentary behavior, which refers to sitting and not moving, had been increasing worldwide with more people working from home, not in a local office space like Modern Work Suites. The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) recently published a 15-year review on sedentary behavior and found that, in 2016, the average American adult was sitting for roughly 6.5 hours per day. Unfortunately, living a lethargic lifestyle comes with numerous health risks beyond simply burning fewer calories and gaining weight. These include:

A weaker immune system,
Diminished muscle strength and endurance,
and an increased risk of heart disease, including high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and stroke.

While walking more can help improve your health, it supports improvement in your overall performance. Walking during work hours can enhance mental function and well-being, improving productivity and work output. A small study observed the effects of different exercise regimens on 30 sedentary office workers and found that even five minutes of exercise every hour (e.g., taking a quick walk) can improve your mood, increase your energy levels, and reduce appetite, among other benefits.

Consider your office space walking technique.

To turn your regular walk into a more fitness-oriented stride, it’s important to focus on maintaining good posture and purposeful movements. To achieve the ideal form while walking for fitness, strive to:

Keep your head up, eyes forward, and chin parallel to the ground
Relax your shoulders, ensuring they’re not tense or hunched up towards your ears
Engage your abs by drawing your belly button toward your spine and tightening your core muscles
Swing your arms naturally, bent at a 90-degree angle with your elbows close to your body
Land on your heel, then roll forward onto the ball of your foot, pushing off with your toes to propel yourself forward

Adopting good posture and purposeful movements can elevate your regular walking routine into a more beneficial fitness activity.

The benefits of walking at Modern Work Suites are more significant when you walk faster, farther, and more frequently. Alternating periods of brisk walking with leisurely walking, also known as interval training, is another method that can be highly beneficial for your health.

You can reap numerous benefits and maximize your time by incorporating interval training into your walking routine. In fact, interval training improves cardiovascular fitness and burns more calories than regular walking. Also, you accomplish the exercise in less time than a typical walking session.

Incorporating regular brisk walks into your routine can have a multitude of benefits. If you make it a habit to walk one mile every day, you will reap numerous benefits.

It helps you lose body fat and maintain a healthy weight,
Prevents or manages various conditions like heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, cancer, and type 2 diabetes,
Improves your cardiovascular fitness,
Strengthens your muscles and bones,
Improves muscle endurance,
Increases your energy levels,
Enhances your mood, memory, and sleep,
Improves your balance and coordination,
Strengthens your immune system,
and reduces stress and tension.

Modern Work Suites have done the research!

We encourage you to pick up a new habit in the second quarter. Walking around the perimeter of Modern Work Suites 7.6 times will equal the same distance as one mile.

Here’s how it works:

Start at the elevator and head down Broadway Avenue.
Take a left onto Seventh Street,
Take another left onto Hollywood Boulevard,
Take a left onto Main Street,
Finally, take a left back onto Broadway Avenue.

Once you finish one lap, walk through the corridors six times more times. On the start of your 8th lap, make your way down Broadway Avenue, Seventh Street, and then onto Hollywood Boulevard, stopping at Suite 202, currently officed by Kreativ Element.

Modern Work Suites office space floor map on the path to walk from start to finish. — Walking Map

During your walk, remember to respect other businesses by keeping your talking in a soft tone. Also, if you pass someone you don’t know, say a quick hello offering some midwest hospitality.

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Four Challenges of Remote Work

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Four Challenges of Remote Work—And How Hybrid Can Help

Working from home is great, but not all the time. Despite the perks that many remote workers enjoy, the downsides can be detrimental to one’s productivity, motivations, feelings of autonomy and overall happiness levels.

Switching to hybrid work—a work style that allows employees to blend working from different locations, whether from home, an office or coworking space—can make all the difference.

Here are the most common challenges of working from home, and hybrid work solutions.

Challenge: Difficulty Unplugging After Work

Working from home might save time on one’s daily commute, yet most employees report working longer hours. A trend index from Microsoft shows that high productivity is masking an exhausted workforce. The lines between work and home life are blurred, largely in part to a majority of the workforce now working from home.

Based on their findings, the digital intensity of workers’ days has increased substantially, with the average number of meetings and chats steadily increasing since last year.

For example, the average meeting is 10-minutes longer than the previous year’s recordings and the average Microsoft Teams user is sending 45 percent more chats per week and 42 percent more chats per person after hours, with chats per week still on the rise.

Most interestingly, meeting and chat overload hasn’t altered response time. This means that 50-percent of people still respond to Teams chats within five minutes or less. “This proves the intensity of our workday, and that what is expected of employees during this time, has increased significantly.”

How Hybrid Work Can Help

For many teams, switching to a hybrid work model creates a better work-life balance. In fact, achieving a healthy work-life balance is the number one reason employees seek more flexible work options such as hybrid work. Other top reasons include time and cost savings, less commute stress and more opportunities to spend with their families.

Unlike working from home where leisure activities may affect output, hybrid work offers a familiar productivity-focused structure with added flexibility. With more coworking spaces popping up in the suburbs, you may only have to travel a couple minutes to be in a more productive environment.

Coworking spaces are typically more appealing in terms of design and layout, and working from an ‘inspired’ workplace will inspire you. In addition to having all the equipment you’re used to—meeting rooms, a communal kitchen, mailboxes and copy machines—there are other benefits thrown in. Some spaces offer free beer on tap while others feature private phone booths, a mother’s room or standing desks.

Challenge: Feelings of Loneliness

Mental health in the workplace is often overlooked, but should be taken as seriously as physical wellbeing. The CDC notes that 1 in 5 American adults experience mental health problems, with 71% reporting at least one symptom of stress.

OWL Labs ran a study on how remote work affects productivity and overall happiness at work. They found that 80% of employees believe being able to continue to work remotely, post pandemic would make them feel like their employer cares about them.

Furthermore, DeskMag found that 71% of people surveyed were more creative and 62% reported that their measure of work improved significantly. Ninety-percent said they felt more confident when coworking.

How Hybrid Work Can Help

The good news is that hybrid work can actually benefit your mental health. Environment can enhance or detract from doing one’s best work.

At Modern Work, we’ve included filters and ‘moods’ that allow members and teams to curate the best spaces for their particular work styles. It gives teams the flexibility to choose a space based on the layout, the location or the overall atmosphere.

A coworking spaces like Modern Work allows teams to create an ideal work environment for their hybrid work employees. In many ways, teams and individuals can cherry-pick aspects they want and don’t want (a quiet atmosphere, or the place that always stocks a certain brand of tea). There are also filters in place to better narrow down available space options.

Challenge: Strained Communication Channels

The way teams communicate has shifted significantly over the past year. For many workers, there was (or perhaps still is) an adjustment period. In-person meetings were replaced with video calls and many video calls were transferred over to email.

Email and other collaboration tools can be really helpful in streamlining communication, but it does require a consistent effort to be understood as intended. For example, since words are written rather than spoken, the way it’s read and interpreted isn’t always in the way it was intended.

Zapier words it best. “When the bulk of your communication happens via email and the like, it doesn’t take much for bad blood to develop unless everyone is making their best effort to the contrary. Small misunderstandings that could have been nipped in the bud with the wink of an eye or a certain tone of voice can quickly snowball into drama.”

How Hybrid Work Can Help

While it’s true that collaboration tools like Zoom, Slack and Teams have come to the rescue during the pandemic, there’s still a certain chemistry that happens with in-person meetings. Through Modern Work, teams can reserve meeting rooms on-demand by the hour and private offices by the day or multiple days.

Modern Work offers many conference rooms and meeting spaces in Omaha. It’s easy to filter spaces based on amenities, equipment (things like a whiteboard, presentation display).

Challenge: Poor Motivation and Productivity

Working from home has been linked with feelings of isolation and even loneliness, both of which directly impact one’s motivation and productivity. Humans are social creatures and it’s only natural that we’d want to meet in-person at least some of the time.

Microsoft also noted that shrinking networks are endangering innovation. Specifically, the pandemic-drivel isolation people feel in their personal lives is also happening at work.

As Dr. Nancy Baym, Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft aptly writes, “when you lose connections, you stop innovating. It’s harder for new ideas to get in and groupthink becomes a serious possibility.”

A slowdown of career developments and promotions may also contribute to feelings of low motivation. When everyone is working from home, it’s more difficult to network, gain ‘on-the-job’ experience or pursue advancement opportunities.

How Hybrid Work Can Help

When you’re working from home, there are certain distractions that don’t exist in an office environment. Distractions come in many forms, from barking dogs and crying babies to laundry in the dryer. Employees who live in a city like New York, where prices per square footage are high, finding a room or even a corner of a room to work from can be tough.

Working from a coworking space, as part of a hybrid work model, creates an instant separation. You wake up a little earlier, dress up a little nicer and eat a little better. Even if the whole team isn’t working together in the same space, having other people around is stimulating and provides a sense of normalcy.